FAQ: Frequently asked questions

Photoshop is a state-of-the-art image processing package and
is in our opinion the best available.

Photoshop is widely accepted as 'industry standard' for professional
graphics artists.

Photoshop CS works completely natively with 16 bit files.
Most astronomical observations are 16 bits or more, so before
we could not exploit the full dynamic information in the images.
The 16 bits we have access to now has a great impact on quality
of the colour images that are composed.

Photoshop has a large development community and the software
is therefore always in rapid development.

If you do not want to use Photoshop there is a free java image
package that can read FITS images called ImageJ. It's based on
the older NIH Image program from the 90's and is free: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/
. To our knowledge this is the only cross-platform completely
free software that handles FITS files.

We do not have plans to support GIMP, PaintShop Pro or others.
For Linux users it should also be possible to run Photoshop, see
this article.

5. Q: After downloading and trying the FITS Liberator,
I was wondering if there existed a similar, easy, image-alignment
tool.

A: Good point. To our knowledge it does not
exist for Photoshop, although it would be an obvious place to
have it here. The tool we use is Registar.
We are investigating whether it is feasible to develop a registration
tool for Photoshop. Follow, or participate in, the development
by checking the draft specifications for v.2 that will soon be
available in the menu to the left.

4. Q: Photoshop CS is too expensive. Are there other
options?

A: You can also use Photoshop
Elements 2.0. It costs around 99$, Note: it does only support
8 bit (which should be enough in most cases).

3. Q: The Photoshop action script does not download as
expected on a Mac.

A: You have to "save linked file as",
i.e. Alt-click on the file.

2: Q: I seem to have problems installing the plug-in
with a non-English Photoshop.

A: Indeed. We are aware of this and are working
on a solution.

1. Q: Are you planning on releasing the source code?

A: In most cases the answer would be that we
are not allowed to do this due to our contract with Adobe Systems.
There is however a possibility to perhaps share code if you apply
for, and become, an Adobe
SDK developer. Note that we have used NASA's CFITSIO
for the FITS routines and these are public.